I am just learning Linux, one of the issues I'm having is that this Machine (with respectable desktop specs) takes about fifteen to twenty minutes to restart. I'm wondering id that's normal because it's a server class OS and simply just has a lot of processes to start, or is there something wrong, if so than what?
Once it's up it doesn't seem to be slow at all.

The only time I've encountered situations like that on my boxes was when the networking wasn't configured properly and it was trying to access real world services (like ClamAV updates, ntpd, off-box ldap or other items) and couldn't. It eventually times out, but is really slow.

Oh for a Ctrl-C during the boot phase to tell it to give up on some service it's hung on.

Not sure if this has anything to do with it, but every time I install something via YUM I get the error ".....you might try running yum install-complete-transaction"
Which of course I do and the message never goes away.

Also yum can't download the packages for bootchart, error ends with "no more mirrors to try"

OK, and try running (as root user) yum-complete-transaction. You may have to repeat it more than once (maybe many times) to clear the uncompleted transaction list. Read: man yum-complete-transaction for details. For example: you can tell it to only clean up the transaction list, not to actually try to do anything (by passing the '--cleanup-only' switch).

V

P.S. This begs the question: how did YUM/RPM's database get so whacked? Something funky happen we don't know about, like a live upgrade?? Transaction aborted/power failure after a commit???

P.P.S. When you're done cleaning up the mess, also run (as root), part of same yum-utils package:package-cleanup --dupes
package-cleanup --problems

I do not know, all I can say is that I am trying to figure out how to get Snort up and running. Perhaps it was when I was trying to install slew of things using Tarballs and RPMs prior to realizing the magic of yum? Could that have done it?

I'm impressed. It took two seconds to run the command you mentioned and clean up unfinished installs. At that point I went back and tried installing Bootcatch again and what do you know it worked.
I wish I was a Linux guru, that was pretty cool. I'm going to reboot and see what happens now after I figure out how to add it to the boot line in grub.

To clarify the situation, the initial boot process goes fine. It's the signing in and loading the desktop that literally takes 10-15 minutes.
I sign in, watch the circle go round near the mouse for about four minutes then look at a blank desktop for another twelve or so before being able to see anything other than the generic desktop background.

I'm leaving work now, I'll look at the results of bootcatch tomorrow. However since I addressed the issue incorrectly at the beginning of this post I realize that bootcatch might not be the answer to my problem.

After a boot with that option, you can (as any user) simply run command "bootchart" from command line inside your HOME folder, and a picture will be generated. You can see what is causing the delay. Perhaps if it's a desktop loading item/issue, you won't see it, but I suggest that you try.

V

P.S. Installing software from tarballs, whether source code or binary, could well be a problem, if system libraries were replaced. That's why I suggested a 'package-cleanup' run, but a more thorough verification might be required.

Check your dns resolvers. If you for some reason can't resolve (such as your own hostname) this could cause sendmail, ntp, named etc to hang for very long during startup... But 15 min is a loong time. Could be combination of several things. Possibly hardware error?

By DNS resolvers I am going to guess that that's a lot like DNS settings. After a quick Google search I learned that DNS setting are stored in a file /etc/resolv.conf.
I opened it with Gedit and noticed there was three lines in it. one was my windows DNS server, then there was a mysterious 167.206.7.4 address and finally there was 4.2.2.2